All Hallows Eve

Columbian Cemetery

I visited the Columbian Cemetery in the afternoon on Halloween. I wanted to observe Halloween in a different way from my usual candy handout. And besides, I’d driven past it many times, but never gone in, and I was curious.

The cemetery is in North Portland, tight between an overpass on Interstate 5 and the blank walls of industrial buildings. I turned off Columbia Boulevard through new iron gates with bright lights at the corners.

Inside, the cemetery was surprisingly quiet. Large old trees stood here and there with smaller trees volunteering in no particular pattern. I could see the evidence of care by the cemetery’s “friends” group (http://www.fohcc.org), as well as some scattered vandalism.

I strolled around the graves, reading the headstones and markers. Here was a 17-year-old woman – a “pioneer of the Oregon Trail” – who died two days after her son was born. And the remains of her son, who had died 15 months later. Across the way was a long-married couple and a couple of their children.

Some of the monuments were marble, and the rain had dissolved their numbers and letters. Others were granite, as sharply defined as when they were carved. Still others looked like concrete, some readable, some not. The main impression was that death eventually makes us all equal.

With the passage of time, all the physical traces of our lives – our bodies, our houses, our graves – become indistinguishable from all others. Even our gravestones will disappear under the dirt turned over by earthworms year after year. Headstones weather, monuments tilt and fall as roots push up or earth settles.

We want to be remembered, but we can’t count on it. More important to be here, to be fully present, to remember yourself, to be grateful for your loved ones, and to be doing what has meaning for you in this life.

 

Dignity

At the ends of their lives, my parents, through example, taught me about human dignity.

My father died first, from lung cancer. In the final weeks of his life, he laid in bed in our den. He was a large man, and he gradually became less able to move, or even roll over. His pain medication dazed and weakened him.

One day, my older brother came home to find that Dad had soiled himself in the bed. Neither my mother nor my brother knew what to do, and the hospice nurse would not come until the next day. They felt helpless.

Then Jim, one of my brother’s friends, came to the house to visit. As a teenager, Jim had a difficult relationship with his own parents, and my father was always available and accepting of him. Jim learned how to care for the bedridden during his own father’s final illness. He showed my brother how to turn Dad, cleaning him and changing the sheets.

Several years later, Mom was dying of congestive heart failure. She’d stopped eating and drinking, and we expected her to pass away within a few days. She needed more intensive care, so my brother found a hospice center where she could stay. She agreed to the move.

When she arrived, the hospice staff told her that she could order anything from the kitchen that she wanted, any time. She brightened, and said, “Well then, I’d like scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast. Crispy, with butter. And black coffee.” She lived another 15 months in hospice. Whenever I visited her, the staff told me how upbeat she was. She always smiled, asked people how they felt, and complemented the food, the care, even the way they dressed.

When she died, many of the staff members told me about their great affection for Mom, and the hospice director told me that Mom had shown them that they could enrich their patients’ lives by more often asking them what they wanted. As a result, the hospice improved its procedures to maximize the residents’ choices and autonomy.

At the end of life, Mom and Dad were cared for like babies. Other people – often strangers – took them to the bathroom, bathed them, even turned them over in bed because they couldn’t do it themselves. Eventually, they became completely helpless. We make ourselves dignified by the way we act, and they were not dignified.

But they had dignity.

Dignity is a gift we give each other. We give people dignity when we really see each other as human beings, and respect what is human in each other.

And my parents received respect and were treated with dignity because of the love and respect – and dignity – they offered other people. This is their lesson for me.

 

Chief Feature

“Every man has a certain feature in his character which is central. It is like an axle round which all his ‘false personality’ revolves. Every man’s personal work must consist in struggling against this chief fault.”

G. in In Search of the Miraculous, by P.D. Ouspensky, p. 226.

There are only a few mentions of chief feature (or chief fault) in Ouspensky’s book, but they are intriguing. It is clear that understanding and weakening your chief feature is central to becoming more awake.

Chief feature is a pattern. It’s a pattern of acting and reacting that has developed from how you feel about yourself, and to some extent also from how you feel about other people, or about the world.

Gurdjieff apparently was gifted in giving a pithy description to chief features – Ouspensky said about this gift “It was not psychology even, it was art.” Examples in In Search of the Miraculous include “never at home,” “does not exist,” “argues about everything,” “no conscience,” and “lack of shame.” Not everyone’s chief feature can be defined in this way, with a quick phrase, but the chief features can nevertheless be seen.

In my work on myself, my chief feature became quite visible to me. Chief feature is very big – it can appear anywhere, at any time. But after a long time of knowing what it was, seeing it in more detail, and opposing it in many ways large and small, I found myself no longer making progress. I even stopped really noticing it.

The problem was that chief feature became for me a kind of taxonomy, like identifying a bird or butterfly. For a long time, just seeing my chief feature was enough to weaken it. But eventually, simply saying to myself, “Aha, there’s my chief feature” didn’t have much effect.

Recently, I’ve found it helpful to take things in smaller chunks – that is, I’m noticing my feelings and thoughts without categorizing them so quickly. When I notice an emotion, for example, I might ask myself one or more questions, like:
• “Where did this come from?”
• “What does it mean?”
• “What does it say about what I believe?”

And then I ask myself: “What do I (really) want?” And finally, I ask myself: “What do I need right now to move toward what I want?”

The answer to that last question opposes the chief feature in that moment. It helps keep my work against chief feature from becoming too detached. And it brings me back to my goal of becoming more awake and more myself.

 

The Mustiness of “The System”

Gurdjieff and everything to do with him smells a bit musty to me these days.

Scholars are analyzing his philosophy, historians and revisionists are putting all the players into their places. Folks who’ve been hurt vent their anger. Folks who are really into it analyze the tables of the hydrogens or parse the food octave for hidden knowledge.

The metaphors are dated:” “Man is a machine.” The language is obscure: “Heptaparaparshinokh.”

It all reminds me of the ads in the backs of magazines for the Rosicrucians. You know, “Know the secrets of the ages,” and stuff like that.

And I’m dropping my pebbles into the pond anyway.

Well, we don’t know where this stuff came from, we can only guess at it. All we can really know is what we do with what we have.

Can you use it? Does it help wake you up? If so, then use it.

 

Three Levels of Brain

One of the frameworks for self-observation is the idea that we have relatively independent “brains” – the intellect, emotions, instincts, and learned movements.

At the next level, each of the brains is divided into three parts. These parts are called the intellectual, emotional, and mechanical (or instinctive) parts. The mechanical part of a brain operates without any attention – often, without even any awareness. The emotional part operates when your attention is drawn by a topic – you like it or dislike it, basically. And the intellectual part operates only when you direct your attention. I think a better word for it might be the “intentional” part of a brain or function.

With this framework in mind, you can observe yourself and catalog your observations.

This is one of the many points in the Fourth Way where it’s easy to wander off on a side path. I spent some time on it myself.

It seems like this is a map of the “machine,” the human machine, and it is a kind of map. It also seems that you can identify all the connections and inner workings using this model – but really, as a model, it’s very incomplete.

It seems to me that the real purpose of learning this division is to become much more aware of where and how your attention goes.

Because awareness of your attention is the foundation of becoming more aware and more conscious.

 

Having an Aim

“The teaching by itself cannot pursue any definite aim. It can only show the best way for men to attain whatever aims they may have. …How is it possible ‘to do’ anything without having an aim? Before anything else ‘doing’ presupposes an aim.”

G., in In Search of the Miraculous, by P.D. Ouspensky

I think for some people, this is the easiest thing to do – to define their personal aims. I struggled with it for many years.

After only a short time in the Work, I knew perfectly well that I needed to have goals and act intentionally. I developed my goals and plans and figured out what stood in my way and tried my best to keep moving forward. But in living day to day, I would eventually forget my aim just when I needed to remember it.

Today I think that I fundamentally misunderstood the idea of having an aim. I think that this word – Aim – is used in the Fourth Way to mean something definite and distinct. It says something about what you need in order to accomplish what you set out to do.

The Aim is specifically what you’re aiming at. It’s what you’ve selected from all the possibilities in front of you. It is not about letting go of anything, working against anything, or overcoming anything. All of these other things may be necessary, but they are not the Aim, or even truly part of the Aim.

I’ve blogged about working on my compulsion to overeat. I struggled with this tendency from the time I was 10 or 12 years old. I was always on a diet – I didn’t want to eat too much, I wanted to lose weight, I wanted to stop being fat, and so on. Much of this was about getting rid of something.

In the same way, for years I approached my inner work as a way to stop feeling inadequate in one way or another, or to be lovable, or to understand capital-T Truth.

Most of the time, I was trying to get away from something, though sometimes I was trying to become something different. And certainly, the work I did was necessary and helpful – but it didn’t necessarily lead where I wanted to go.

And it turns out that this was because I didn’t define what I was aiming at. I focused on what I wanted to be rather than what I wanted to do.

Lately, I’ve focused on what I want to do, and I have found that my Aim is right in front of me every day. It’s more like a compass than a map. I can easily remember where I’m aiming to get because it has all the force of my desire. It is this desire that helps me remember myself.

 

The Physical Body’s Minds

“At this moment I want to explain to you that the activity of the human machine, that is, of the physical body, is controlled, not by one, but by several minds, entirely independent of each other, having separate functions and separate spheres in which they manifest themselves.”

“G.” quoted in In Search of the Miraculous, by P.D. Ouspensky

We’ve been going through a long and severe heat wave, and I wish that my different bodily minds really did operate “entirely independently” of each other. In fact, they usually interfere heartily with each other.

I’m too hot, so it makes me grumpy. And too hot to read. Or play music. Or write.

Really, if you think about it, being too hot is a sensation. If I’m grumpy, the sensations are interfering with my emotions. If it’s too hot to read or write, the sensations are interfering with my thinking. If it’s too hot to play music, that could be an emotional condition, too – or perhaps a physical one. And if I’m hot, I sure don’t feel like jumping up to get things done. I just want to relax with a cold drink.

One thing I know about the minds that G spoke of is that they have the potential to work independently, but it takes some effort on my part to keep them working on their own stuff: to keep the intellect thinking, the “instinctive” body living and sensing, the “moving” body oriented and moving, and the emotions desiring and perceiving.

Even if I am hot, I can still think, move, and feel. I don’t have to let the state of being hot run the show.

 

Negative Emotions 2

Where I work, we recently heard that about 145 people, half of the staff, would be laid off in three waves over the next 6 months. The layoff notice has been handled poorly, resulting in much unhappiness in the bureau. (Incidentally, I am not being laid off – at least for now).

A few days after the announcement, I had grown somewhat angry, and I was complaining about the situation to another worker. She repeatedly pooh-poohed my complaints, saying, in effect, what did I expect? We’d all seen the budget crunch taking shape.

I started to get really angry with her. I thought, “She’s taking away my right to be angry.” And this thought was so different from my Fourth Way training that it stopped me.

The Fourth Way teaches that you need to overcome being controlled by your negative emotions in order to wake up. A very common exercise (found in Fourth Way books) is to avoid expressing negative emotions.

Groups often seem to develop rules about expressing negativity. Complaining and criticizing are generally frowned on, and people may be expected to master their negative feelings before discussing whatever stimulated them.

I found this approach to working with negative emotions very useful – even necessary. But I also think that I made the mistake of making a permanent practice out of an exercise.

All emotions, even negative emotions, have their uses. All of them are ways of processing information. I now believe the trick is to separate myself from them so that they don’t control me. When I can stay separate from them, I learn from them. If I get caught up in identifying with them, I usually get stuck in them for a while, and it takes an effort to get unstuck.

For a while in my inner work, I think I lost sight of what negative emotions mean. Instead of observing them and listening to them, I put them aside or felt that they were wrong – even maybe a little shameful for someone trying to wake up.

Anger can be about boundaries, for example. Sadness can be a connection to some previous hurt that hasn’t been resolved.

But I feel that I over-did the negative emotion exercise because there are so many discussions that might have led to greater understanding, but that I didn’t have because I couldn’t avoid expressing my negative feelings. I think that the way I did this exercise kept me from developing more intimate friendships for a long time.

So anyway – I have the right to be angry about the way the layoffs are being handled. And of course, my co-worker can’t take that from me. But I also have the right not to be angry, and if I exercise that right I might get to feel something even better than anger.

 

Seeing the Lie

One of the basic principles I was taught in the Fourth Way is that everyone lies all the time. Sometimes we lie intentionally, but most of the time we don’t even know we’re lying. It’s said to be part of being asleep.

The self-judging part of me rather liked to be able to say that I lie all the time. I could feel pretty bad about that. But that’s not what it’s about.

Actually, Gurdjieff doesn’t seem to have said it quite this way (at least, not as recorded by Ouspensky in In Search of the Miraculous). He said something more subtle: “A man can never tell the truth. Sometimes ‘it tells’ the truth, sometimes ‘it tells’ a lie. Consequently his truth and his falsehood have no value, neither of them depends upon him, both of them depend upon accident.” (p. 159, in In Search…)

The business about ‘it tells’ a lie or the truth refers to the notion that an ordinary person is a machine and that a real human being is something else.

Anyway, I’m still working on getting intimate with my compulsive eating self – my “food addiction.”

Any addiction is devoted to lying – all the time. When my addictive self is speaking, it is lying. I may not know in the moment that it is lying, but it’s lying.

My task, if I want to be free, is to recognize and expose the lying. This is the hard work. The part of me that has been lying doesn’t really want to stop. It has what it wants already.

So as I work to be more and more honest with myself, the addictive part of my mind tells more and more truthful-sounding lies. They’re based in reality. They’re just self-serving (for the addictive self, that is, not for me).

But I’m catching on. It seems that just about every time I need to justify what I’m doing, or get sensitively irritable, or feel crabby – I’m lying to myself. These are called “buffers,” because they keep me from seeing the truth. These are the warnings, the signals that I need to be on the alert for lying.

Sometimes it takes a while, and it’s usually pretty uncomfortable, but as Gurdjieff said (in In Search again) “In order to destroy the lies in oneself as well as the lies told unconsciously to others, ‘buffers’ must be destroyed.”

In other words, to stop the lying, first I have to question my justifying, irritability, and crabbiness. I have to let go of my hurt or unhappy feelings so that I can look at what I’m doing objectively. Then I can stop lying to myself.

 

Just Trying to Figure it Out

I’m experimenting with putting images into my blog. I haven’t really tried before. Here goes:

Me and my wife on top of a mountain.

A valley where I used to live.

dragonfly